Also: Pakistan has hidden its nuclear
weapons in various sites so that the U.S. will not be able to destroy their
arsenal. Their intelligence service, the I.S.I., helped create the Taliban, and
according to the regular media (CNN, WSJ, NPR, NYT etc.), I.S.I. agents are
still working with
the Taliban, and some reports say the I.S.I. has connections with Al Qaeda.

This means, as a U.S. government official recently acknowledged on NPR , that there is a good chance Islamic Militants have a
working nuclear bomb.

(Note: Isn't it great that we have such a
good ally as Pakistan in the war on terror?)

Islam and the West --

U.S. policy in the

Middle East

Readers: This page had not been modified since the
"Arab Spring," so please keep that in mind. I would like to point out, in
the context of these new circumstances , the hypocrisy of U.S. agents like
Hillary Clinton crowing about democracy when they would still be endorsing
"stability" if Mubarak were still in power. The U.S. has never wanted democracy
in Muslim countries because, among other reasons, it doesn't want Islamic
governments to come to power, and up until the end of the second Iraq war used
to preach separation of church and state to the Arab world, except of course to
Saudi Arabia. Separation of church and state has only worked under the gun of a
police state in these countries, except for Turkey where Kamil Ataturk's
pervasive legacy made it possible. Now we are seeing the emergence of government
by the people, and, although the people are of diverse views on what they want,
it is nice to see the U.S. have to take a back seat to the foment of real
indigenous politics. Involvement of church and state does not have to mean a
theocracy -- a la Iran, and even in places like Egypt which the U.S. used to
tout as a fine example of church/state separation it was never true, beyond
nominally outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood in the legislature. In Egypt the
municiple courts have long been sharia courts, they practiced religious law.
Although the government could trump any decision, it rarely did so. My question
is, did the U.S. ever believe its call for church/state separation could be
realized? Or were they just bluffing as an expedient? It was when the U.S. was
faced with forming a democracy in Iraq that the reality of this issue became
undeniable. ............ For an article on the recent history of the views
pertaining to democracy of Islamic intellectuals
Click here. ( Article by Anthony Shadid, New York Times reporter who
recently died while reporting from Syria.)

A Science Magazine article reports that in Iraq the U.S. deliberately
arrested thousands of civilians with no terrorist affiliation because these
people, when interrogated, would create an information network that can be
submitted to computer programs which would reveal information about terrorists. All during the
Cold War and now in the Middle East the U.S. has supported ad carried out
brutal, murderous treatment of civilians. In the Cold War this drove people into
the communist militias, and in the Iraq and Afghanistan maltreatment has driven young people to join the militants. Many U.S. soldiers have spoken of how
our military abuses people we are supposedly trying to help, treating everyone
they encounter as an enemy, trashing homes and terrorizing the people in them,
killing for no reason. This new twist, throwing people in jail just to create a
database, is about as Orwellian as it gets. For Science Magazine article
click here.

U.S. is prosecuting army snipers who killed people who picked up "bait," such
as a gun, left on the ground by the army personnel. The people killed were
innocent, and the snipers, who follow orders, are being unfairly prosecuted.
click here for articles Through the
course of the Iraq war GI's have taken the blame for malfeasance while officers
are not charged. The torture of prisoners is another example.

Is the following not unbelievable? ..... Abdul Khan, creator of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, sent
blue prints and hardware for nuclear weapons to Libya, Iran and North Korea, and
yet the Pakistani government has basically exonerated Khan,
with U.S. blessings. Pakistan has not let the U.S. investigate Khan's
network among government employees,
although it was obviously extensive. The U.S. government position on this?
No comment. The U.S. obviously doesn't want to say bad things about our ally in
the war on terror. For articles on Khan's network click here

Also unbelievable: the FAA and Air Force failed to
send Air Force jets into the air on 9-11 as per their normal practice when a
commercial jet deviates from its flight plan, and at first both agencies gave a
false account that denied this lapse. After two years of pressure from certain
members of the 9-11 Commission and others, the FAA and Air Force admitted their
version was wrong. So then, for two more years the FAA and Air Force have
studied how their false claims happened. Then, in 2006, they issued reports that the
errors were innocent, paperwork and the like. To read more click
here.

U.S. government covered for Pakistan's
nuclear bomb program in 1980's. CIA whistle blower squelched.
Pakistan's nuclear bomb program was kept secret by the U.S. government
as it evolved in the 1980's because exposing it would have mandated a cutoff of
funds to Pakistan, funds that bought Pakistan's cooperation in helping
Afghanistan's mujahedin fight the Soviet occupiers. Richard Barlow, a whistle
blower in the CIA who wanted to stop the nuclear traffic and cover up, which
included letting private U.S. companies ship prohibited technology to Pakistan,
was ousted from the CIA and then the Department of Defense for his efforts.
Compensation for his unjust treatment and reinstatement of his pension and have
been scuttled by various ruses (National Security) and he now lives poor in
Montana. The basic facts of this case are not in dispute, but it remains little
known, even though the lunacy of our relationships with the governments of
Pakistan and Afghanistan are being widely debated in the press. The New York
Times and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have have been
their mouths zipped on this one in recent years. For articles click the
following: The Guardian 2007 article,
click here, for an
article with lots of links by POGO.org -- the Project on Government
Oversight --
click here, for a review of Barlow's case by the Congressional
Research Service,
click here.
For and article from The Economist, January 3, 2008
click here.
This article discusses the book "The Nuclear Jihadist," which addresses various
related issues. (Amazon has it.)

Pakistan and the blasphemy law. Following the January
2011 killing
of Punjab's governor for denouncing Pakistan's
blasphemy law, an outpouring of Pakistani support for the killer has got U.S. policy-makers in a
sweat, and reporters are noting that a younger generation is leading
this hard line Islamic cause. For NYT's article
click here. For AP
article click here.. An
Islamic hard line among young Muslims has been observed
by journalists who claim that where parents are more moderate and
ambivalent, their children are declaring a hard line. I specifically
remember a NYT's article to this effect on Algeria.

The following paragragh was written before the "surge," which
seems to have suppressed the violence in Iraq to an extent. But the basic point of the paragragh,
that we have used wanton imprisonment and brutal treatment of civilians, instead
of doing what Patraeus tried to do in Mosul, and that this has created
instability and militancy, remains true.

The war in Iraq, like all the U.S. Cold War
operations, is a political endeavor, not just a military one. But just as the
U.S. supported Cold War governments that abused their own people viciously,
exterminating dissenters and union leaders calling them communists, and
thus drove people to join communist rebellions, the U.S in Iraq has
failed to grasp that abusing innocent people is a recipe for strengthening the
enemy. It is also against the principles that are supposedly the basis of
overseas coampaigns. Perhaps the most cruel and reckless thing the U.S. has done in Iraq is
throw men and boys in jail for nothing and leave them there with no right to
communicate with their families. For months, for years. If the U.S. leadership
wants more terrorism, the war in Iraq has been prosecuted in a manner that seems
intended to achieve that goal. Trying now to reduce U.S. casualties, policy
makers have called for more air
strikes, fewer foot patrol searches. The result is more civilian death. When
General Patraeus took control of the Mosul area early on, he tried to use political
engagement, rather than strong arm methods. Mosul has spun out of control, but
the picture in Mosul and elsewhere might be very different if Patraeus's
approach had been employed in all parts of Iraq by the U.S. .....General Peter Chiarelli
said he wants his troops to do less shooting
and more rebuilding, but the troops retort that building projects failing
because of insurgent attacks. It appears too late to hope for Chiarelli's method
to succeed. It seems obvious brute force isn't going to work. Maybe if the U.S.
had worked on a post-invasion strategy before invading, the Chiarelli/Patraeus
way of thinking would have prevailed over the brute force approach. President
Bush has apologized for his "bring it on" remark, but it is not just that he
said this -- with regard to the Iraqi resistance -- but that this is how
the administration actually was thinking -- brute force will prevail.

A report issued in November, 2004 by a Pentagon advisory panel, the
Defense Science Board, made the following assertions with respect to the U.S.
political agenda in the Middle East: ''Today we reflexively
compare Muslim 'masses' to those oppressed under Soviet rule. This is a
strategic mistake. There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell
among Muslim societies -- except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as
apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and
defends......Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our
policies.........When American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy
to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.'' In
the eyes of the Muslim world, the report adds, ''American occupation of
Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and
suffering.'' The report also says: ''The critical problem in American public
diplomacy directed toward the Muslim world is not one of 'dissemination of
information' or even one of crafting and delivering the 'right' message. Rather
it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none -- the United
States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of
Muslims and of Islam.'' To view article,
click here.

The following are among most important issues pertaining to the Middle East and
Western policy................. Do Islamic militants and many ordinary
Muslims resent the West more for what it is, modern, changing, sexy, democratic?
Or do they mainly resent what the West has done for decades politically with
respect to the Muslim world: preach democracy while supporting oil
dictatorships, and preach separation of church and state, which will not fly in
a Muslim democracy? Since the U.S. has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq it has
learned that Muslims will not accept a Democracy that separates church and
state, but this is after years of steadfast preaching church /state separation.
Whatever the true nature of Islamists' hatred for the U.S., and there is
surely variety, it should be
clear that U.S. pro-dictatorship
policy, combined with a call for church state separation, has been a major factor in the rise of anti-Western
Islamic extremism, such as the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran 25 years ago and
including Al Qaeda. U.S. policy for decades has been one that holds people
down, politically, while trying to inject them with a version of culture that is
akin to cultural rape -- separation of church and state, and all the sleazy,
sexy, money-grubbing Western ways that we take for granted and think they should
too. And then there is the the
Israeli/Palestinian issue. Something that few seem to understand in the
West is that when Jews seized the land and homes of Palestinians and other
Arabic people in 1948-9, thus forming the state of Israel, the action was
nothing but armed robbery. There was the fact of a U.N. resolution backing of
the event, born of sympathy for Jews after the WWII Nazi extermination of Jews,
but that doesn't make what happened on the ground justifiable. The Western world
looks at the statement that Israel has no right to exist as some sort of
extremist hate rhetoric, but it is not. Israel stole other peoples'
property, house by house. What right does it have to keep what it stole?
That Jews lost homes in subsequent expulsions by Arabs in surrounding Muslim
countries cannot be denied, but that does not constitute a justification. Of
course, stealing land is what history is all about, but this theft was too
recent for it to fade already into the lie of legitimacy. What needs to happen,
if Muslims are to begin to accept Israel as a neighbor, is that the theft of
Palestinian lands be acknowledged as fact, in front of the world, by Israel and
its sponsors, and that the media and the world recognize that Israel stole its
land from Palestinians. Ample monetary compensation must be made to the families
who lost their homes, and we are talking about many billions. It is
possible Arab countries may come to a peaceful reckoning with Israel, but not
until the Zionist travesty of 1948-9 is recognized as an act of thievery by
armed force. ............Before the current experiments in forming democracies
in Iraq and Afghanistan the U.S. has always and only supported dictatorships in
the Middle East, Israel excepted. Egypt and Turkey are not democracies, as the
U.S. has long claimed. Among many restraints in Turkey and Egypt, there is
no freedom of speech and the courts are corrupt tools of the ruling elite.
(Turkey is a little better than Egypt, if you're not a Kurd.) Egypt's ongoing
crackdown on protests calling for an independent judiciary may provoke some U.S. complaints, but
political freedom and fair elections would bring the Islamic brotherhood to
power immediately, so, obviously the U.S. does not want democracy in Egypt. What
we can only speculate on is how things would be if the U.S. and Europe had not
been forever manipulating this part of the World. There is much to suggest that
Western manipulation and maintenance of Middle East dictatorships has been the
major factor in bringing Islamists to the fore. This is like the Cold War, in which
rebellions with communist slogans and Soviet backing arose or intensified
because the West forced vicious, murderous governments down the throats of the
people in the name of anti-communism. ......Church-state separation used
to be what the U.S. called for in the Middle East, but now in Afghanistan and
Iraq, which are post-war showcases, the U.S. has been forced to realize that an Islamic
democracy will not submit to a U.S. mandate to separate church and state, any
more than Israel would. (Israel grants a serious role in government to the
clergy.) The arrogance of the U.S., glowering as if from some moral high ground
on the church/state issue, pointing to a corrupt and sold-out government like
Egypt's as lighting the way for the Muslim world, is what Muslims see and deplore.
They are not going to let the U.S., long time supporter of butchers like the
Shaw of Iran, dictate the terms of democracy. .... Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and his anti- Western venom resulted
from years of brutal repression by the Shaw, whose dictatorship the U.S.
installed, or helped install, crushing a democracy that gave the Muslim clerics
a role in government. We would like to remind readers that up until
the first gulf war (1991) the U.S.
supported Sadam Hussein while he slaughtered Iraqis, and the U.S. ignored his
chemical-weapon extermination of Kurds, while supporting the war he started
against Iran. U.S. supported the Taliban in Afghanistan until they backed
out of a major pipeline deal, something Americans don't know because the media
never mentions it.

For an Associated Press article on Israeli seizure of Palestinian
property, invoking a 1950 absentee owner law that was written for the sake of
seizing the homes of refugees from the '48- '49 war,
click here.
Note: the West Bank settlements, and the
routing of the wall to define West Bank property as Israeli, are examples of
more pilfering to go along with original Zionist theft.

For a New York Times article on Mali, where a flexible clan
culture goes back centuries, surviving empires and colonial rule, and clerics
don't get involved in politics,click here.
(We would like to note that this example of separation of church and state
emerged under special circumstances over centuries, and Muslims around the world
now are not likely to adopt this model.)

Article: A new Moroccan law gives women political rights, based on
passages and interpretations of the Koran that support women's rights. For
article click here.

Article: NY Times Sept. 4, '03. The 101's Airborne managed a diplomatic,
sensitive occupation in the North of Iraq, under General David Patraeus. His
approach has been to respect people and their rights, unlike the occupation in
Baghdad. Click here.
.......... The sector under Patraeus has experienced violent rebellion like the
rest of Iraq, but if all of Iraq had been administered with Patraeus's approach
it is possible there would be stability in Iraq now.

Below is an editorial from the
New York Times about the government in Azerbaijan and the support it gets from
the U.S. Illustrated is the absurdity of the the belief that the U.S. is
an advocate for democracy in the Middle East, anywhere other than Afghanistan
and Iraq. In a more recent Azerbaijan election the U.S. has taken a more
genuinely pro-democracy stance, but after the phony election the U.S. has gone
back to embracing the dictatorship. In Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Georgia the U.S.
has backed those fighting for democracy. But these are exceptions to the
historical and current rule in U.S. policy.

The New York Times, Oct 27, 2003 pA22

Nepotism in Central Asia. (Editorial Desk) COPYRIGHT 2003 The New York Times Company

On Oct. 15, Ilham Aliyev, businessman, playboy and novice
politician, received a nice gift from his father -- the country of Azerbaijan.
Heydar Aliyev had ruled Azerbaijan almost continuously for 34 years, first as an
agent of the Soviet Politburo and then as an autocrat in his own right. When he
became too ill to continue, he anointed his son to run for president in his
place. Ilham Aliyev ran a rigged campaign, using all the powers of the state,
and then celebrated his victory by arresting most of the opposition. To conclude
this nasty exercise in dynasty building, Azerbaijan's new president accepted the
fawning congratulations of the outside world -- including Washington.

It was an ugly month for Azerbaijan -- and for American
goals in the region. President Bush has said he went to war in Iraq in part to
create democratic models in Islamic nations. But America's support for the
Aliyevs suggests the administration has not learned the lessons of its
oil-inspired support for the shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein and successive Saudi
governments.

Mr. Aliyev's election was rigged from the start. The
government appointed supporters as election officials. Police blocked opposition
rallies and beat up opposition supporters. Citizens' groups were banned from
monitoring the vote. When the opposition began to protest Mr. Aliyev's
declaration of victory with 80 percent of the vote, the police charged the
crowds. Hundreds of people were seriously injured and several killed. Hundreds
more were arrested, including polling-station workers who refused to sign
falsified vote totals.

The outside world did nothing to discourage Mr. Aliyev
from this raw display of power. The day after the vote, President Vladimir Putin
of Russia called to say, ''The people of Azerbaijan support your balanced
program for developing the country.'' That was predictable. Another call was a
surprise, and embarrassing to Washington. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary
of state and former co-chairman of the United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of
Commerce, a group close to the Aliyev family, phoned to congratulate Mr. Aliyev
on his ''strong showing.''

A State Department spokesman said, belatedly, that the
election featured serious irregularities and ''politically motivated arrests.''
He called for an investigation as well. But the United States would do better to
keep the new president at arm's length and avoid repeating the unfortunate
history of supporting autocrats who sit atop oil riches.

After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait there were these four response options
frequently cited by the U.S. media at the time (1) Western diplomacy -- that is,
talks between the Western powers (U.S. and Europe) and Iraq; (2) An Arab
summit, which might coax Hussein into withdrawing, something Washington dreaded
because it feared Hussein would get an easy out -- his aggression would be
condoned instead of punished; (3) economic sanctions and (4) war. At first,
following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, there was discussion in the U.S.
press about Washington's fear of an Arab summit, Arab nations handling their own problems. "The
nightmare scenario," was what a bemused media claimed the Bush
administration was calling the likely outcome of an Arab summit. But between the
invasion and the war the press stopped talking about the "Arab summit" idea,
seemingly due to pressure from Washington, but perhaps just due to editors who
personally shared the administration's fear of an Arab summit.

A common response to the above observation is that an Arab summit would not
have worked -- Hussein could not have been coaxed out of Iraq peacefully. But
Washington obviously thought an Arab summit might succeed, which is why they
were so afraid of it, and it is clear that only Arab diplomacy had a chance of
influencing Saddam, who was not going to let the West scold him into compliance.
And consider the sort of arguments Egypt and Syria and Jordan together might
have made to appease Saddam. They could have allowed as how what Syria was doing
by occupying Lebanon was not that different from Iraq in Kuwait. Lebanon was
carved out of Syria by the French in a manner somewhat like the separation of
Kuwait from Iraq by the British, and Syria's troops were in Lebanon dictating a
solution to the civil war. And the assertion that Kuwait is properly part of
Iraq had been voiced in the past by various individuals of prominence in the
Middle East. Hussein might have been enticed into withdrawing by pointing out
how terrified Washington was of an Arab-mediated, peaceful outcome, and that he
could rub Washington's nose in it by taking part in an Arab solution. At the
same time he could be reminded that he would lose in a war with the U.S.,
although he might not have been able to grasp that fact.

Could Hussein have been cajoled? Is it true that
the U.S. press at first discussed then fell silent on the Arab summit idea? Did
the U.S. press knowingly start pulling its punches when it fell silent on the
peaceful option of an Arab summit? Did Washington lean on the press to stop
talking about the Arab summit ? Was the U.S. wrong to fear an Arab summit
and stifle it? What would be the consequences of Arab states peacefully
inducing Saddam Hussein to exit Kuwait? Who were the people in the U.S.
government and Middle East governments who tried to defend and promote the idea
of an Arab Summit? These are important questions and we would much appreciate
comments from readers, and we would much appreciate names of websites that give
insight into these issues, or other issues on this page, so we can link to those sites...... A couple of other related issues: the $3 billion dollars that
went to Saddam through an Atlanta branch of an Italian bank before the first
Gulf War, was a travesty blamed on one man at the Atlanta branch, who was
prosecuted and took his humiliation without protest -- a team player. This case
needs to be investigated and exposed........ Also, w/re to depleted Uranium.
After Desert Storm (Jan. 1991) the U.S. press marveled that U.S. tanks had
knocked out about 250 Iraqi tanks while not losing any tanks to enemy fire. The
ten or so U.S. tanks knocked out were hit by misdirected fire from other U.S. tanks.
("Friendly Fire"). In the months following the war the U.S. press did not
mention depleted uranium, which enhances tank armor and anti-tank rounds. U.S.
tanks had it, Iraqi tanks didn't. And that is why the U.S. only lost tanks to
its own fire. It was years later that discussion of depleted uranium began to
appear in the press. Failing to mention it with the tank figures in 1991 was
another case of U.S. press rolling over for Washington, was it not? And then
there are claims that Madeline Albright told Saddam before he invaded
Kuwait that if he did he would not meet resistance from the U.S.

U.S. manipulation of the Middle East scenarios took an interesting twist in
the months before 9-11. Something few Americans know is that
the U.S. was happy with the Taliban police state, in Afghanistan, back when the
Taliban
were complying with U.S. intentions to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. The
U.S. only turned hostile to the Taliban in July, 2001, after they began to argue
with the U.S. about the pipeline plan. The pipeline was expected to run from
west of Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. It is claimed the Taliban were
largely installed by Pakistan with the consent and some say active input from
U.S. agencies.

Are the above claims false claims? Misrepresentation? The point is these claims come
from credible sources in the U.S. and in Muslim countries. Americans should be
discussing these claims but we're not. The NY Times, Wall St. Journal, NPR, etc.
are scarcely looking at the ugly history that has brought us to the ugly
present. They have routinely talked about Turkey and Egypt as if they were democracies,
up until the last year or two, and even now they're pretty coy about it. As with
Cold War policy, there is a reasolable argument the U.S. is doing the right thing in supporting Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, Algeria and other dictatorships and in supporting fake
democracies like Egypt and Turkey. This website does not believe in propping up
dictatorships, but there is an argument for supporting dictatorships. But what we don't
respect is the ignorant belief that the U.S. has been defending democracies around
the world since World War II. We have been crushing and preventing democracies
from happening, from Iran to Zaire, in the name of anti-Communism and
"stability." Furthermore there was a valid option in each case not to crush
democracy but to support it, not just in the long term but in the short term as
well.

And as for the notion that Turkey is a democracy, consider
this dispatch regarding Kurds in Turkey, a persecuted minority.

Turkey: Name Restrictions Lifted....The government announced that it
was lifting a ban on Kurdish and other ethnic first names. CNN-Turk television
broadcast the announcement after receiving it by fax in the form of a copy of
new government orders to local authorities. The form said, "All names using the
Turkish alphabet that do not offend public opinion or undermine public morals
can be used."

Photos from New York Times Jan. 6, 2002

.

The following graphic explains why we are manipulating governments in Muslim
countries in ways that make Muslims hate us, and love Bin Laden, according to
many Americans with a perhaps somewhat jaundiced view of the whole process. It
cannot be denied that oil causes statesmen to behave in very slippery ways. Iran
fell into western clutches because of oil as much as politics.

...............................................

Below is a little bit of history on Iraq and
Saddam, excerpted from the internet.

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence
agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts
with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized
six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim
Qasim.

In July 1958, Qasim
had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked
not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."

According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the
Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq
was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region
and whose members included Turkey,
Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his
sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked
everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Washington watched
in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union
and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power,"
according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA
Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in
the world."

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched.
Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost
his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding
Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had
bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got
stuck in the lining of his coat.

"It bordered on farce," a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. But
Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam, whose calf had
been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and
Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.

Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence
agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While
Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a
brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get
to Cairo, they said.

One former U.S.
government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam
"was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat."

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently
that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F.
Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this.

"We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had
happened," this official said.

But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was
hunting down Iraq's
communists, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen
with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and
summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with
intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told
UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat,
literally, the Palace of the End.

A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad
to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to get kidding.
This was serious business."

A former senior CIA official said: "It was a bit like the mysterious killings of
Iran's
communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. All 4,000 of his
communists suddenly got killed."

British scholar Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," quotes Jim
Critchfield, then a senior Middle East agency official, as saying the killing of
Qasim and the communists was regarded "as a great victory." A former long-time
covert U.S. intelligence operative and friend of Critchfield said: "Jim was an
old Middle East hand. He wasn't sorry to see the communists go at all. Hey, we
were playing for keeps."

Saddam, in the meantime, became head of al-Jihaz a-Khas, the secret intelligence
apparatus of the Baath Party.

The CIA/Defense
Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the
Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a
team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS
surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according
to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency intelligence group.

This former official said that he personally had signed off on a document that
shared U.S.
satellite intelligence with both Iraq
and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate.

"When I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind," the former official told
UPI.

A former CIA official said that Saddam had assigned a top team of three senior
officers from the Estikhbarat, Iraq's military intelligence, to meet with the
Americans.

According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's
ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by
blinding Iranian radars for three days.

The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m.Aug. 2, 1990, when
100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait.
America's one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy

Below is a commentary which repeats many
points made above in the editorial paragraphs at top of page, preceding the
article listings. It's repetition, but it may read a little smoother.

Democracy in the Middle East In Iraq and Afghanistan
the U.S. has gone to war to topple dictatorships, and is now obliged to
practice what it preaches with respect to promoting democracy. The fact that the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein of Iraq
through his long history of horrors and exterminations, up until he got
out of line and invaded Kuwait in 1990, and the fact that the U.S. has
always supported dictators, not democracy, in the Middle East, should
figure in Americans' thinking about this new democracy-building policy.
U.S. support for oil-rich dictatorships as preferred business partners
is one reason the U.S. sets aside the issue of democracy, and another is fear that honest elections will bring Islamic militants to power,
just as the U.S. feared that elections would put Communists in power in
the Cold War. The war on terror is also given as a justification for
supporting undemocratic governments like Pakistan's, whose complicity in
sending nuclear secrets and technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea
has been diplomatically whitewashed by the U.S........People everywhere in the world
(except for the U.S.) know that the U.S. programs to build democracy
-- in Iraq and Afghanistan -- are a complete switch from past U.S.
policy, and a contradiction to our current policy in other Middle East
countries. But in the U.S. press there is a kind of pious swaggering -- the
U.S. against the enemies of democracy -- that much of the U.S. public
seems to buy into, as if there were a history to support this claim to
the moral high ground. (For an example of such editorializing
click here)....
President Bush declared over a year ago that he would like to see the
whole Middle East democratize, and went so far as to say, "Sixty years
of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the
Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run,
stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." It is
amazing that Bush spoke so honestly, in this instance. It seems very
doubtful, however, that these words are going to going to be backed up
by real pressure from the U.S. to allow freedom of speech and real
competition in politics in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey*,
Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan etc. Only
where the U.S. is conspicuously on the global stage, in Iraq and
Afghanistan, is democracy arguably the real U.S. agenda. In Ukraine and
Georgia the U.S. has supported democracy after it came to be, but the U.S. wasn't a
factor in the change.
*(There has lately been some credible competition in Turkish
politics, witnessed by the current administration, but Turkey remains a
police state, thoroughly corrupt, where the Kurdish minority has no
rights despite a few crumbs they have recently been thrown. Elections do not equal democracy.
Look at Mexico.)

..... The U.S.
has called for separation of church and state in the Middle East up until the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the subsequent effort to promote
democracy. It has since become clear that building democracy in
Afghanistan and Iraq can only work if the church, i.e. the Muslim clerics, is
granted a role in government, and Islamic law figures legal affairs. The U.S.
had long insisted that Egypt and Turkey should light the way for the rest of the
Muslim world because the U.S. approved of their church/state posture. Now that the U.S. government has had to face reality,
the U.S. press has said nothing about the government's arrogance and stupidity
over the years in thinking
that a Muslim democracy would accept church/state separation. It is worth remembering that
democracies that give religion a say in government are not a new thing. Consider Iran before the U.S. imposed the Shaw,
or Israel. We never hear the U.S. complaining about the vested power of Orthodox
rabbis in the Israeli government. Nor did the U.S. press ever rouse itself to
point out, when the U.S. government was preaching church/state separation
to Muslims everywhere, that Israel violates that principle. It is worth noting
that Greek Orthodox is the state religion of Greece, treated like a branch of government. .........The U.S. press is full of talk about the crazed
Islamists who hate the West for trying to get Muslims to join the modern world.
The Bush administration, allegedly under the influence of author Bernard Lewis,
subscribes to the view that Islamists have a historical chip on their shoulder,
having lost the driver seat of civilization to
Christians back around the 14th century, and so they seethe and fester in their
self-imposed dungeon, refusing to come out into the light of the modern world.
..........What is left out of such arguments is that Muslims are being held down
politically by dictatorships that the West supports, and that it is against
this Western-supported repression that Islamists rise up in retaliation, even
though militants themselves are inclined to cast themselves as pure religious
zealots. (Don't believe everything terrorists say.) And Muslims everywhere resent
the U.S. for its controlling, pro-dictatorship policy, so that terrorists and
ordinary peace-loving Muslims are of of one mind when it comes to what they
think about U.S. policies in their part of the world. It is
not simply a matter of their culture being threatened by T.V.,
mini-skirts, and pre-marital sex, it is that they are being held down
politically while this debauched culture is injected into them. They have no
voice against a corrupt elite which panders to Western corporations, betraying
their countrymen and their history and religion. The people turn to
conservative Islam because it seems pure and decent compared to the likes of the
Mubarak government and its "pro-democracy" U.S. backers. Militancy has a natural
appeal after decades of the real people getting nothing while the elite kill and
jail reformers, with U.S. blessings. .......A case worth reviewing is the
rise in Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his anti-Western movement in the
1980's. This movement arose as a reaction to years of state terror under the
Shaw, who was installed in a Cold War coup engineered by the U.S. at the expense
of a democracy which showed signs, as the U.S. read it, of falling to the
Soviets. (The signs included nationalizing British Petroleum.) The Iranian
democracy had granted influence in state affairs to the Muslim clerics, whereas
the Shaw stripped the clerics of all power, and exterminated anyone who
complained. Khomeini's anti-western virulence rose from the ashes of the Shaw's
state terror. But people in the West, especially the U.S., typically clueless as
to U.S. manipulation of politics in the third world, stared at the specter
of Khomeini as if he were a cobra that had risen inexplicably from a picnic
basket. Current hatred of the West in Muslim countries arises, like Khomeini's
movement, because the West supports dictatorships that hold people down and deny
them the right to shape their own political future.